Friday, September 27, 2013

Soros Adviser Turned Lawmaker Sees Crisis by 2020: Japan Credit

Takeshi Fujimaki, a former adviser to billionaire George Soros and now a member of Japan’s upper house of parliament, said a fiscal crisis in Asia’s second-biggest economy is inevitable and neither a higher sales tax nor the 2020 Olympics will be able to stop it.

George Soros was born in Budapest, Hungary, in 1930. His father was taken prisoner during World War I and eventually fled from captivity in Russia to reunite with his family in Budapest. Soros was thirteen years old when Hitler's Wehrmacht seized Hungary and began deporting the country's Jews to extermination camps. In 1946, as the Soviet Union was taking control of the country, Soros attended a conference in the West and defected. He emigrated in 1947 to England, supported himself by working as a railroad porter and a restaurant waiter, graduated in 1952 from the London School of Economics, and obtained an entry-level position with an investment bank.

In 1956, Soros immigrated to the United States, working as a trader and analyst until 1963. During that time, he developed his own theory of markets called 'reflexivity', which he has laid out in his recent books THE ALCHEMY OF FINANCE and THE CREDIT CRISIS OF 2008 AND WHAT IT MEANS. In 1967 he helped establish an offshore investment fund; and in 1973 he set up a private investment firm that eventually evolved into the Quantum Fund, one of the first hedge funds, through which he accumulated a vast fortune.

George Soros is a self-described student of Karl Popper, and strong opponent of totalitarianism. He has devoted much time to philanthropy — among other projects, founding the Open Society Institute in 1993 — and, after 2001, to US domestic politics, donating millions of dollars to Democratic candidates and liberal 527 organizations and earning political enmity in the process. Soros has published numerous books, including THE CREDIT CRISIS OF 2008 AND WHAT IT MEANS; THE AGE OF FALLIBILITY: CONSEQUENCES OF THE WAR ON TERROR (Public Affairs, 2006); THE BUBBLE OF AMERICAN SUPREMACY (2005); GEORGE SOROS ON GLOBALIZATION (2002); OPEN SOCIETY: REFORMING GLOBAL CAPITALISM (2000); THE CRISIS OF GLOBAL CAPITALISM: OPEN SOCIETY ENDANGERED (1998); SOROS ON SOROS: STAYING AHEAD OF THE CURVE (1995); UNDERWRITING DEMOCRACY (1991); OPENING THE SOVIET SYSTEM (1990); and THE ALCHEMY OF FINANCE (1987). His essays on politics,